In The Blink of an Eye
by mattmetzger
Summary: Three years have been lost, but even now the Russian is back, Napoleon isn't sure that he won't lose Illya anyway. One bullet destroyed the partnership; now, it may destroy the partners themselves.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes: A chaptered work. A warning: slash ahead, if not immediately.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter One**

He couldn't remember how he came to be walking alone the road, but suddenly and somehow he was. He knew the road fairly well – his memory fed him the landmarks and updated the files in his brain about this road.

What he couldn't understand was why he was there.

The road was the main one to Moscow from the village he had ended up in after his father's death. His mother's parents had lived here, and Illya could faintly remember the last happy memories of his childhood being spent with two of his cousins and his little sister in the woods along the side of this road, before his grandfather upset one too many high-ranking officials and the family was destroyed with the same merciless speed that the KGB, years later, had taught Illya himself.

He knew that he _shouldn't _be here.

He kept walking long enough to glimpse the edge of the village, and knew the dream for what it was when he saw that leaning old house, decrepit and cosy, still standing, smoke peeling out of the chimney with the faint aroma of cooking. An elderly woman, stooped and ancient, was scattering feed to a few lanky chicken in the yard, and her blue eyes turned to peer at Illya as he paused on the roadside.

That house had been burned to the ground in 1946, and Illya's grandparents shot dead in the ruins.

"Illyusha! You came home!" she cried, her face lighting up, looking so much like his long-dead mother, her heavily accented Russian bringing Illya's mind back to stories of Vladivostok, sat on her knee as a child. "My Illyusha, welcome back! A hug for your grandmother, come here!"

"Then I am dead," Illya surmised, and shook his head. "Dead or dreaming. Wake _up_."

He sank his nails into his arm, a savage twist and pinch, and the vision exploded in a million shards, the darkness crowding in and drowning him.

* * *

He had a headache.

No, it wasn't a headache. It was World War Two, nuclear bombs and all, going off on the inside of his skull. It was the Chinese and the Americans duking it out over Korea. It was Khrushchev with that damnable shoe and his angry outbursts. It was Captain Maklakov singing his drinking songs up and down the submarine even as the other officers wondered if they could kill him and get away with it. It was a lot of things, but it wasn't a headache.

Illya's eyes were closed, but his other senses worked. The smell was a giveaway: a hospital or medical unit of some kind. Nothing else, not even experimentation labs, smelled quite like this. And apart from the headache, he felt rather comfortable. The bed was soft, the sheets warm and not scratchy. The air was clean, if a little dry – recycled, likely, through some air conditioning unit. At a distance, there were very quiet voices and the sounds of heels on tiled floors, back and forth and back again. Nurses, probably, outside what he presumed was either a ward or a private room.

He inched his eyes open, the lids and lashes feeling gritty, and flicked a fuzzy gaze around the room. Room. Nobody else, and no other beds. The secured windows and the cameras mounted on the walls, coupled with the evidence of a private room, allowed him to relax properly.

U.N.C.L.E.

Illya had enough of a reputation in the medical wing at headquarters that they tended to put him in a room by himself and stick a guard on the door so he couldn't sneak away or disturb other patients with his loud demands to be let out.

Now, though, he had no intentions of being let out. His injuries – whatever they were – must have been very bad. His headache was incredible, and his entire body felt limp and weak. He could barely feel his feet at all, and the muscles in his neck wailed as he rolled his head on the pillow to look around. And what a mistake that was – the headache boomed like the launch of an I.C.B.M., and he groaned quietly, pausing to let the world reassert itself before trying to move again. It was a supreme effort to even inch his fingers over to reach the call button that sat on the edge of the bed, to summon someone, because he wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

Finally, he pressed it, and let out a long sigh. Where on earth was Napoleon?

Ah, yes, that mission. The mission, he vaguely remembered, had gone well – he'd retrieved the microfilm, but they had had to shoot their way out. There had been an idiotic number of guards, and then he remembered hearing a gunshot behind him and Napoleon's warning and – ah.

Well, that was easy. He had been shot and clearly drugged into oblivion after surgery. Drug-induced sleep always made him feel like he had been turned the wrong side out, scraped clean, and reversed again. He would be feeling much better in a week or so. In which case, time to tell the nurses to stop giving him drugs – he pressed the button again, and held it for several seconds, before his strength failed him and he sighed deeply, almost sinking into the bed in sheer exhaustion.

Outside, the heels stopped dead for a long moment, before the door crashed open and two women flew into the room. He was tired enough that he ignored their shrieks – what a silly reaction – and drifted back to sleep. It wouldn't do to be tired when Napoleon came, after all.

* * *

Napoleon dismissed Parker and Fleischer from his office and pushed the files to one side, rubbing his aching temples. This job was certainly teaching him why Waverly hadn't smiled much.

Waverly had retired three years ago, and Solo had been appointed his successor. It was a surprise to no one, especially under the circumstances at the time. Instead of reassigning Solo, it was simply more prudent to push him into Section One, and then, in a short period of time, into the position of Number One.

Sometimes, he still itched for action. Sometimes, he wanted to go out and shoot the bad guys himself – sometimes, he still ached to do that last mission over, and shoot that guard dead before he had the chance to fire his own rifle. But he couldn't – here he was, and while normally Napoleon liked the job, it was just wasn't the same.

"Mr. Solo," the intercom buzzed, "Dr. Michaels is here to see you. He says it's very urgent."

"Send him in," Napoleon muttered, and mustered his firmest face when the flustered medic entered. "Ah, Dr. Michaels. I know the communications blackout in the medical wing is inconvenient, but we really do have to sort mobile communications first. That is what will lead to..."

"I'm not here about that," Dr. Michaels snapped, coming around the desk to physically pull Napoleon out of his chair. The doctor was the epitome of polite distance, and for a moment, Napoleon was too shocked to do anything. "Come with me. Now."

"Why?" Napoleon demanded. "Your behaviour is..."

"Bloody understandable!" the Englishman exploded. "It's Kuryakin!"

The blood drained from Napoleon's face, and their positions reversed – suddenly, it was Solo grasping Michaels' arm and not the other way around. The affability was gone, and Solo was suddenly hard and firm.

"What happened?" he demanded.

"About an hour ago," Michaels replied, "Kuryakin regained consciousness, pressed the call button for a nurse twice, and then passed out again. A couple of my staff got into the room in time to see him lose consciousness again."

"And why weren't you here an hour ago?!" Napoleon demanded, throwing on his suit jacket and storming for the door. "Sandy, hold all calls and visitors," he barked at his secretary as he aimed for the elevators, the doctor running after him.

"We had tests to run, scans to perform," Michaels explained breathlessly. "But you'll want to be down there, Mr. Solo. The scan results are changing. I would say that he's finally waking up. For good."

Napoleon stabbed the button for the medical unit, and made no reply.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes: First specks of slash coming through.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Two**

Napoleon wasn't completely sure what he had expected, but the hospital room was the same as always. After endless discussions with the doctors, about what was happening in Illya's brain, about new chances, about miracles and the like, he had dismissed them and come here.

It was the same as it had been seemingly forever. Quiet and well-lit and filled with that faint, low beep that Napoleon had come to love. The noise that told him that no matter what he dreamed, Illya hadn't left him yet.

He took up his usual seat, on the right side of Illya's bed, and slide his fingers around those lax, pale digits. He squeezed hard – properly harder than the nurses would like, if they saw it, but Napoleon didn't care. If it hurt, and that woke Illya up, then he wouldn't feel guilty about the brief pain.

"They said you woke up earlier," he murmured to the still form. He looked no different – no different at all. And even though he had woken up, those injuries...he was quite likely not the same man at all. He was quite likely mentally retarded, permanently damaged, _ruined_.

And deep down, Napoleon knew he was doomed because he didn't even care about that. At this point, all he wanted was some proof of life. Proof that the bullet hadn't killed him, as it should have done.

"I know you're antisocial," he continued softly, his voice the only warm thing in the sterile room, "but it's incredibly rude, you know. Just going off back into that little world in your head and ignoring me again after demanding I came. You knew I'd come if you pressed that button."

Gingerly, he lifted his hand and stroked the very edges of Illya's hair, where it cupped the top of his ear. He had only gotten to this point a few months ago – only now dared to touch anywhere near Illya's head. The wound had long-since healed – if he sifted through the blond hair to look, there would only be thin white scars, flat and unimpressive – but he couldn't help but remember the horror of it, and he was still terrified of hurting Illya's head further with his touch.

"There's nothing physically wrong with him," the doctors had said – an _age _ago now – but that just didn't sink in.

Napoleon knew that without Illya's reassurance and permission, it never would.

"You obviously wanted some reaction, and you got it. Terrified the life out of Nurse Richards, you know," Napoleon continued, stroking Illya's strong fingers absently. "You'll be lucky if she ever comes back in here. She's about the only nurse here who thinks you're an _easy _patient to care for. Mind you, she's only been here six months, so she doesn't really know you, does she?"

The banter had come very gradually. When Illya had first been admitted, Napoleon had been able to do nothing but cling to his hands and try not to cry or shake him in frustration. As the days, weeks, months passed, that sheer panic had faded into a depression: a terrible, gnawing pain that was the incomplete loss of his partner, coupled with the desperate, just-about-possible hope that he would come back.

Now, he talked or read. Everytime he came, he filled the air with noise, hoping that somewhere inside Illya's locked-down mind, it was making a difference. If nothing else, soothing him. If Napoleon couldn't bring him back, he could at least hope that wherever Illya was, he wasn't afraid.

"I know it's not my usual time," Napoleon said. "I'll come back tonight after work anyway. You wouldn't complain about extra time, would you? Especially not if I promise to bring the latest science journal for you. Dr. Michaels has started flicking through them himself, you know. You're educating the masses even from your bed. Nice job if you can get it."

He stopped dead, listening.

Had Illya sighed?

His breathing and heart rate remained steady and shallow, as they had been all the way through this hell, but Napoleon was sure that he'd heard one of those breaths released with more force than usual.

"Illya?" he breathed, hardly daring to hope. "Illya, can you hear me?"

He leaned forward, leaned over that slack face and moved one hand to his cheek, tapping lightly.

"Illya, wake up," he crooned. "It's time to wake up, Illya. It's not Sunday – we can't sleep in today."

His heart leapt – felt like it literally bounced in his chest – when the hand in his suddenly curled around his fingers like a slow, weak trap. Some kind of tension boiled in the muscles of his face, before Illya's eyelids flickered and Napoleon was rewarded with a flash of blue.

That blue held Napoleon's world. He hadn't seen that blue – that _exact _blue – for a long time, and had almost forgotten what it looked like. His photographs didn't do it any justice at all, and he hadn't dared exert the pressure near Illya's eyes enough to peel back his eyelids. That flash of blue tilted Napoleon's world on its axis, and the breath he released was distinctly shaky.

"Oh," he whispered, his voice dangerously close to cracking. "Oh, Illya..."

His spare hand fluttered around Illya's face, unsure what to touch, unsure what to do. He should, he knew, call the doctor, but he was determined not to have this interrupted. It could be, after all, his only chance. He knew nothing about comas – knew nothing about how they could or did end. For all he knew, this conciousness was nothing but a brief respite, or a prelude to death.

He squeezed those fingers back and offered Illya a trembling smile that felt too wide for his face. In response, the edges of Illya's mouth twitched briefly upwards for a moment before those slits of blue vanished again when he closed his eyes.

"Tired," and the word was more a breath than anything requiring vocal cords, but Napoleon could have cried at the precious sound all the same.

"Then sleep, sweetheart," he murmured, not caring what Illya thought of the endearment. He probably wouldn't notice. And even if he did, Napoleon would be damned if he was supposed to apologise for it. Not today. "Go to sleep, and I'll wake you again in a little while."

"You...alright?"

"I'm _fine_, Illya, I'm fine," Napoleon breathed, realising that Illya would have no clue how long it had been - would probably think that the mission was barely over. "I'm fine now that you're awake. It's all going to be fine."

He was given one last tiny pressure from Illya's long-disused fingers before they – and his face – went slack again and he was gone, swept under by that strange exhaustion.

Napoleon, with nobody to witness it, leaned forward and pressed his face into the hollow of Illya's neck, burying his nose in the warm flesh and feeling that steady pulse thumping in the carotid. He let out several long, shaking breaths, but he obstinately did not cry.

It was not a day for tears.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes: This is just a present, as apology. I entered NaNoWriMo, so everything is temporarily on hold.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Three**

When Illya next woke – or when he thought he did – Napoleon was there again, in a different suit but the same soft smile. He squeezed Illya's hand with both of his as he leaned forward in his chair, eyes flickering over Illya's lean face as if examining him.

"How do you feel?" he murmured.

"Tired," Illya repeated.

"Yes," Napoleon said, anxiety gnawing at him now. 'Tired' – that was all Illya had said. 'Tired', and 'you alright?' Napoleon was terrified that he _couldn't _say more. After all, this was the fifth time now that Illya had fleetingly gained consciousness, and he still hadn't varied those three words at all. "Yes, you're tired. But apart from tired?"

Illya seemed to think about that, eyes sliding shut and opening again sleepily, before he lifted his free hand and stared at it, wobbling dangerously and weakly in the air.

"Shaky," he said, and Napoleon sighed, a little smile breaking out. A new word, and in English. This was a good start. He took that trembling hand and squeezed it too. "Feel...weak."

"That'll pass," Napoleon soothed. "That'll pass once you're staying awake for any extended period of time."

"You...?"

"I'm fine," Napoleon murmured. "It's alright. I'm fine, and you will be."

"How...long?"

Napoleon blinked: "What?"

He honestly hadn't expected Illya to notice anything wrong yet. He was so out of it those last few times that he had barely noticed Napoleon was there, let alone that time had passed. And Napoleon wondered whether those few extra lines on his face were noticeable. He wasn't even going grey yet.

"You..." Illya gestured weakly at Napoleon's face with that shaking hand, and Napoleon caught and lowered it, clasping it with its partner. "Lines. Older..."

The anxiety was beginning to creep back. Illya wasn't using complete sentences, or anything close to them. The problem was, with Illya, Napoleon didn't know whether his brain was just too dazed to do it in his third language, or whether it was a genuine problem caused by the brain damage that he had to have sustained.

"You've been in a coma," Napoleon said decisively, squeezing those hands gently. "You were badly hurt. You're going to be fine, but you've been asleep for some time. Be grateful, Illya, you would be in a world of hurt right now if you hadn't been sleeping."

"Okay," Illya murmured, shifting restlessly. "Back aches."

"Come here," Napoleon whispered, and helped his partner to ease over onto his side in the bed. He looked very young and vulnerable like that, his legs curled up towards his chest and his hands lying on the sheets in front of his face, though he kept hold of Napoleon's hand stubbornly. "There you go. Better?"

"Yes," Illya murmured. His eyes were closed, but there was an edge of awareness in the lines of his body now. "Stay here."

"Alright," Napoleon said softly. "I'll have to go when..."

Those blue eyes darted open again and: "_Stay_."

"Alright, alright, ssh," Napoleon soothed hurriedly when the heart monitor's rhythm was disturbed for a moment. "I'll stay if you want it that badly."

The night nurse, a skilled woman in her fifties called Janet who'd probably been with the organisation longer than even Mr Waverly, appeared in the doorway, alert and frowning.

"He's quite insistent that I stay with him," Napoleon offered by way of explanation, and her face softened.

"Awake, are you dear?" she asked, coming around to glimpse those weary blue eyes and offering her patient a motherly smile. "Do you want Napoleon to stay with you for the night?"

"_Da_."

Napoleon silently noted the use of Russian to give the doctor in the morning. As they had no idea what damage had been done to Illya's brain, they had no idea what would suffer and what wouldn't. Anything, at this point, was a signal, and so far, Napoleon was theorising that Illya's comprehension and language skills had survived.

"Okay," Janet nodded, and looked to Napoleon. "I can get a bed set up in here, if you don't mind a little disturbance, or it can wait until he's dozed off."

Illya's fingers tightened as much as they really could on Napoleon's, and he shook his head.

"I think now might be best," he said. It was clear that Illya, for whatever reason, feared him leaving, and wanted some kind of evidence that he would stay. "Don't worry about making a bit of noise."

Janet bustled off, and Napoleon turned his attention back to Illya. His partner was looking fairly alert – as much as he could – but undeniably tired, dark rings under his eyes and his skin almost transparent from the lack of any sunlight. But after so long, he was a beautiful sight, the blue of his eyes almost alien after all this time, and Napoleon felt the tears threatening again.

* * *

Napoleon slept the night in the medical wing. He woke twice when the steady, low beeping of the heart monitor was disturbed, but it turned out to be nothing, and Illya didn't wake. He was still classed as comatose rather than sleeping, because of his low brain activity, but Napoleon had been assured that the activity _was _growing.

He left briefly in the morning to return home, shower and change, and come back. He paused in his office to cancel his appointments and tell Sandy to redirect any urgent matters to his communicator. Their enemies, after all, would not be taking the day off just because Napoleon wanted to see to Illya.

He returned to the medical wing to find Illya awake and agitated, the heart monitor complaining and the morning shift nurse demanding that he calm down.

"I will have you sedated, long sleep or not, if you don't – Mr. Solo! Thank goodness – will you _do _something about him?!"

Illya's eyes were wide and wild, and he seized Napoleon's hand, when it was offered, with a grip that would have been painful if not for the muscle wastage. Napoleon brushed the nurse aside, bending over Illya with ages-old practiced skill to manhandle him back into a prone position and reach for the buttons on the wall.

"If you promise to rest," he said firmly, "then I will prop the bed up and see if we can't manage a conversation. Stop pitching a fit and behave yourself. You are in _no _condition for this."

"You weren't here," Illya responded, still clinging even as he allowed Napoleon to move him. He said it as if it explained everything, and it probably did. "You promised to stay."

"I was only gone for a little while," Napoleon replied, shooing the nurse away with a wave of his hand and a little smile. "I was here all night, I promise you. And I won't be leaving today unless there's an emergency."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He busied himself with propping up the bed and arranging pillows, and considered his partner's condition. He was distinctly more alert, his mind getting back into the swing of things, and so far, Napoleon couldn't detect any clear damage to his abilities – apart from, obviously, the muscle wastage, and there was nothing to be immediately done about that.

"There you go," he said, sitting back into his chair and reaching for Illya's hand again. "If you manage to stay awake long enough, they might give you some soup or something."

"How long?" Illya interrupted.

"What?" Napoleon asked, surprised by the direct question. Oh yes, Illya's mental faculties were up and running again.

"How long have I been...asleep?"

"Long enough," Napoleon replied cryptically, but when Illya scowled, he relented. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Illya thought about that for a few moments, before replying: "Dr. Atkins. We were sent after him, to retrieve him after his defection. He..." Illya paused, then frowned. "He had...unknown security. There was a...a firefight. I don't...remember anything else."

"Because you were shot," Napoleon replied, very quietly. The memory still gave him nightmares: the smell and sight of Illya's blood, all over his hands and clothes. He had held Illya together – Illya had almost died in Napoleon's arms and that still gave him terrible nightmares that left him shaking in a cold sweat and trying not to cry. So many times, his dreaming mind had finished the job for the gunman.

"I..."

"You were very badly wounded," Napoleon replied, "by Dr. Atkins himself. I had to call for backup – they arrived too late to stop him from shooting you."

"How long?!" Illya demanded.

"Three years," Napoleon murmured. "Illya, it's been three years."


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Four**

Tests, tests, a thousand tests and now the doctor had the most he could hope for at the moment.

"I can make arrangements for his care in a rehabilitation facility," he told Napoleon bluntly, and was unsurprised by the stern refusal. "Very well, but I hope you understand that he's going to need continuous care for some time."

"What's wrong with him?" Napoleon asked flatly. And there had to be something wrong with Illya – nobody was that lucky, not even Solo himself.

Dr. Michaels flipped open the brown folder and sighed heavily: "Comas leave their own marks physically. The muscle wastage has happened – would have anyway, despite our best efforts. We never appreciate how much we use our muscles in the easiest things, and Mr. Kuryakin hasn't done any of those things for a very long time."

"He will regain his strength, though."

"Probably not a hundred percent – he's simply too old now to regain the peak he had at twenty-seven graduating from Survival School," Dr. Michaels shrugged. "But in time he should regain the ability to lead an active and mobile life, though I seriously warn against chasing any T.H.R.U.S.H. criminals."

A ghost of a smile flitted across Napoleon's face. After the last time Illya had done that, he would most certainly not be chasing anybody. Not so much as a shoplifting teenager. Ever again.

"He'll be wheelchair bound for some time, and booked in for physiotherapy with Dr. Kreuss – but we'll sort that out when he's discharged," Dr. Michaels waved it aside absently. "We're starting him on a liquid diet, and hopefully he'll be on soft foods by the time he can go home. He'll need to live _with _someone, Mr. Solo. Mr. Kuryakin's, ah, solo habits – well, they're simply not going to cut it."

"I'll see to it."

"See that you do," the doctor said sternly. "Then there's the mental aspects to deal with. I anticipate some levels of depression and anxiety. Particularly the depression – I've had many a Section Two comatose in this medical facility, Mr. Solo, and absolutely none of them have reacted kindly to the loss of time and the long recuperation period."

They both knew that Illya would be absolutely no exception to this rule. If anything, he would react worse than his predecessors. Illya simply didn't like having his control removed from him – but then, Napoleon suspected, neither would he if he'd slipped free of the Soviet military.

"As for brain damage," Dr. Michaels shrugged. "We can't tell really yet. I can tell you that his speech functions and memory both seem to be intact. We've had Miss Stepanova up from Communications to speak with him the odd time, and she says his Russian and Polish are both as complete as they were before the, ah, accident."

"Good," Napoleon said, feeling that he should comment somehow. He could sense it coming though, and sure enough:

"But," the doctor flicked through his notes, frowning a little, "the nurses are already telling me that he seems a little more disorientated than he should be. He's insistent on knowing how that final mission went and whether you're alright, despite the fact that he's already seen you. And Janet – well, we haven't seen it again, so it may well have been simply a dream of his – but Janet said that when she went to check on him last night, he was talking."

"To himself?" Napoleon blinked, astonished.

"Possibly," the doctor shrugged. "We're not sure; he trailed off when she entered the room. He was looking towards the window, but it could have been a dream. Does he sleeptalk?"

Napoleon thought about it. Certainly not on missions – they had both been well trained not to make a noise in their sleep in unsecure locations – but while Illya did make the odd noise in his sleep in a secure place, he'd never heard him coherently speaking before.

"I'm not sure," Napoleon admitted. "Couldn't the...the wound have changed things?"

"It could have changed anything," the doctor shrugged. "It may well have triggered a tendency to speak in his sleep. I expect we'll find out in due course. I should warn you that a lot of patients with brain injuries change the little things as well – food preferences, minor mannerisms – and I would recommend that you don't call these changes to his attention. It can be very unnerving for the patient."

Napoleon nodded and rose to go as Dr. Michaels snapped the file shut.

"Mr. Solo."

He paused, hand on the door, and Dr. Michaels shifted uncomfortably.

"Is there...I mean...does Mr. Kuryakin have any family that we should inform about his...recovery?"

Napoleon frowned. Three faces flashed to the forefront of Napoleon's mind, and his jaw clenched slightly.

"No," he said flatly. "There's nobody left."

* * *

Illya had persuaded a nurse to prop up the bed, and was dozing a little when Napoleon came to his hospital room. Those blue eyes, when they turned on Solo, were brighter and a lot more aware and awake than they had been before.

"I want to go outside."

It was a fast command, in an accent slightly thicker than Napoleon remembered, but it was a demand that he would have expected from Illya at some point, and he smiled.

"Outside?" he repeated. "Why? It's just cloudy and grey outside."

It wasn't even particularly warm. It was early April, the bite of the New York winter still with them, tugging and teasing and not quite ready to let the warmth in. The sun was bright, but weak, and Napoleon had no idea whether taking Illya outside was a brilliant decision.

"Outside," Illya insisted. "It is dull and stuffy in here. I want to go outside."

"I'll have to ask if..."

"If you won't take me outside," Illya interrupted. "Then I will take myself."

He wouldn't be able to yet, Napoleon knew it. But he would be before they discharged him, and he would probably simply take off home. To the home that was no longer his in the first place.

"I have to check with the nurses, Illya," Napoleon said gently. "You've taken thin into a whole new realm, you know. And it's April. Winter isn't yet over. It's _cold _outside."

"They're called blankets," Illya replied flatly. "And clothes," he added pointedly, plucking at the hospital gown.

"Tell you what," Napoleon bargained. "If I bring you a pair of your old pyjamas in tomorrow, then I'll take you out to the park in the wheelchair. We'll wrap you up properly and take you out, but not like this."

Illya thought about it. His calculating mind was still there, and Napoleon was almost sickly glad to see the cogs turning behind those blue eyes, turning without rust in the joints or screeching from a lack of oil.

"Fine," Illya said. "But only if I get something more flavoured than chicken soup and water."

"The finest juice," Napoleon beamed. "I promise."


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Five**

Outside.

Although, as far as his mind was concerned, Illya had been outside only a week before, his body knew very well where it had really been, and he took a deep lungful of bitter New York air as if he were drowning.

Napoleon had been true to his word: at four o'clock that afternoon, he had clocked off work early, brought Illya his pyjamas, a coat and many, many layers of blankets, and gently argued their way out of Medical and into the outside world.

Illya was unimpressed with the wheelchair, but found himself physically incapable of standing. For the moment, he had ignored it – the effort to hold his own paper cup of hot chocolate that Napoleon had bought from a vendor was enough. There was little, if anything, that he could do about it yet.

He knew how frail he must look. Elderly ladies and mothers with their small children kept looking at him worriedly, and he had a suspicion that the vendor had under-charged Napoleon for their drinks. He was thin and wasted, and bundled in so many layers that it was faintly ridiculous, but even then he could feel the cold itching to get in.

"I'm only letting you stay out here for fifteen minutes or so," Napoleon told him firmly. "You can't afford to get sick, on top of everything else."

Illya said nothing, mutely agreeing, and preferring to spend his precious minutes watching the world. Nothing had obviously changed. There were a few trees gone, or new ones bigger than he remembered, and he faintly thought that fashions had moved on too, but he'd paid so little attention to them that he couldn't be sure anyway.

"You'll catch up, you know."

He glanced at Napoleon. The man was sat on the park bench next to the chair, elbows on his knees and smiling that gentle, patient smile that Illya knew hadn't changed in the slightest.

"You'll catch up," Napoleon repeated. "Three years isn't so long in the grand scheme of things."

"Grand schemes," Illya echoed, then said: "What of my things? My apartment, my belongings?"

"The apartment's gone," Napoleon said. "Your landlord eventually figured out we were paying the rent for an invisible tenant, and demanded that he be able to let it out properly again, to use the space."

"So my..."

"Your belongings," Napoleon interrupted, "are in my apartment. I've kept everything you had, Illya, except the perishables. And I'm afraid that spider plant of yours _did _perish – it didn't like my apartment, it seems."

A faint echo of sadness that Illya didn't understand entered Napoleon's eyes, then was gone again as quickly as it had come.

"Thank you," Illya said, and Napoleon smiled, and the reality of his situation seemed to fade a little further into the background.

* * *

Napoleon left Illya that evening, after helping the nurses feed and bathe him, and waiting until the Russian had finally approached slept. He had been barely conscious when Napoleon had said goodbye, and uttered none of the panic of before, simply giving a small, slightly dopey smile and a small Russian phrase that Napoleon couldn't remember.

He had, over the years, forgotten most of the Russian he had picked up. He had never spoken Russian fluently – had only picked up from Illya's occasional mutterings how to swear, how to insult, and the most basic of phrases. 'Hello', 'yes', 'no', 'goodbye' – tourist Russian, as his late mother would have called it.

He went home to his apartment, and for the first time in three years, it didn't seem so pathetic. He hadn't lied to Illya about keeping his things – but he had not done what would have been normal, and kept them in boxes in the closet or in storage.

Illya's belongings were scattered amongst Napoleon's, and it looked for all the world as if Illya lived there, day in and day out, and had done for years. Their books intermingled on the shelves, and that precious record collection that Napoleon hated listening to lived in its own special cabinet under the window in the main room. The spare room – which had always, really, been Illya's room anyway – was filled with his clothes and personal things, and his black coat hung on the peg by the front door. His bathrobe even occupied a space on the back of the bathroom door, and then there were the photographs.

The pain of losing Illya had caused Napoleon to dig out almost every photograph he owned of the man and have them reproduced, bigger and clearer and to be framed and put around the apartment. There weren't many – theirs was not a job to be photographed, after all – but they were there, and they had, briefly, helped – particularly after the death of the spider plant.

It wasn't one of Napoleon's proudest moments. It had come six months after that mission, and the plant had finally given up the pretence and died. And at the time, it had seemed like an omen to Napoleon, as if Illya would soon die as well. He had spent that night in a drunken stupor, trying to remember and to forget the Russian at the same time, and had rushed to Medical the next morning to make sure that nothing _had _happened.

And now, finally, after three long and miserable years, Illya would return to him.

* * *

_He was on the road again, the same dirt road, but another twenty miles along the track. He was in that uniform again, the one he had been proud to wear, once, and the summer sun was as weak as it had ever been._

_"When are you going to come home?"_

_The voice belonged to a man he hadn't seen in years – to a man who was, in all likelihood, dead. He knew it, but he couldn't help the smile that bloomed across his face, and it widened when he smiled in response._

_"Stepan."_

_The name was a blessed one, and they embraced like brothers, and a laugh was bubbling its way out of his chest in euphoria even as his rational mind demanded that he return to the real world, where this man was no longer a part of his life._

_"My Illya," the man said, the faint traces of his Siberian accent just as Illya remembered. "Where have you been all this time? We've been trying to get through to you, you know."_

_"Get through to me?" Illya queried, and he frowned a little. "How could you be? You've been gone a very long time, Stepan."_

_"Gone?" Stepan demanded. "What do you mean gone?"_

_"They sent me to Paris," Illya replied. "I haven't heard from you since. You must be dead by now, I imagine, with your habits of irritating the powers that be."_

_A smile twitched on his face, but Stepan's expression remained concerned, his hands grasping Illya's elbows as if he feared the blond would collapse._

_"Is that what you think?" he asked, then cursed. "It's been far too long. They've left this far too long. You need to come home, Illya. You need to come back."_

_"I'm dreaming," Illya repeated._

_"For now," Stepan agreed. "This is the only way I can speak to you. You need to come home; you're in danger where you are."_

_"I'm not in danger," Illya protested. "Napoleon..."_

_"The American?" Stepan snorted. "Illya, listen to me. You have lost time. You know that now. Why do you think that is? People don't just wake up after three years in comas – not normal comas, not by natural causes. What do you think happened?"_

_"I...I was shot."_

_"Shot? I've been _shot_. And being shot doesn't put you in a coma!"_

* * *

Napoleon was told by Dr. Michaels that morning that he could take Illya home.

"I have his discharge papers and care instructions," the doctor said sternly, "and I am _only _releasing him under the condition that you take care of him. Continually. Take time off if you must, bring him in with you if you have to spend the whole day here for whatever reason. I'm ordering it."

Napoleon had readily agreed, and walked into Illya's hospital room that afteroon pushing an empty wheelchair with a smile on his face.

"Hello," he said, giving Illya a blinding smile and receiving a disconcerted stare in response. "The doctor has signed your release papers. You can come home with me today."

There was a strange battle going on in Illya's eyes, he saw, and he frowned a little, concerned.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Do you need a nurse?"

"No," Illya said. "Sit."

Napoleon perched on the edge of the bed, still frowning, and watched Illya worry at the notion before the Russian said:

"What happened."

"I told you, you were..."

"No. Tell me properly. Tell me everything."


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Six**

_It had been a routine mission. Simple and clean and easy – almost insultingly so, but then, they were nearing the end of their usefulness as field agents._

_It was a mutual approach, really. For Napoleon, he was coming ever closer to being moved permanently into Section One. For Illya, a childhood of malnourishment and the first twenty years of his life being spent on sheer survival and nothing else was catching up at last._

_It was, Napoleon learned much later, meant to be the last field assignment to take them out of the United States at all._

_Unusually, it was an assassination job. The scientist in question had no intention whatsoever into defecting from the enemy, and every intention of using his chemical genius to manufacture bioweapons on a mass scale._

_The U.N.C.L.E. were taking the hard line this time._

_He had owned a private villa in Northern Spain, about ten miles from Oviedo, and it was poorly defended and easy for Napoleon and Illya, heading a small crack team from U.N.C.L.E. Santander, to take by sheer force, skill and numbers._

_Perhaps it was Napoleon's new-found knowledge of the power-politics involved between Sector Heads that made the decision for him, but at the very end, he made a wrong turn._

_He ordered that only himself and Illya were to enter the basement laboratory._

_In the three years that followed, Napoleon would curse that single decision and blame it – and himself – for the result._

_They had not expected the scientist – a Dr. David Mansfield – to be armed. And even if they had, they had not expected him to be any use with a weapon._

_They were wrong on all counts._

_The laboratory had been at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, down which Illya had led the way. The Spanish agents had gone, returning to the rest of the villa to scout the area for stray guards – and probably purloin the rioja while they were at it. An initial report of success was probably already being transmitted to Madrid._

_Too soon._

_The moment Illya had stepped into the doorless room, Dr. Mansfield had turned and fired._

_And then things had become a terrible blur of motion for Napoleon. He remembered, very clearly, the sight of the Russian crumpling like a rag doll, his head snapping sideways as if he had been punched, and the horrific bloom of knowledge in his own chest about where that bullet had gone._

_But training had taken over – Napoleon had dived for him, slamming the pair of them behind a steel lab bench thicker than a door. He had ignored Kuryakin's wound, returning fire and for a sickly seven or eight minutes, the laboratory rang with the sound of exchanged gunshots._

_And even when he heard the sickly, dulled noise of a bullet piercing human flesh, Napoleon had to leave his partner to check that the scientist was dead and not merely wounded._

_He had fired again into Dr. Mansfield's head at point blank range, out of pure anger rather than anything else, before dismissing him from his mind and returning to the Russian._

_And that was when things got bad._

_Really bad._

_The blood was the first clue. There were copious amounts of it, pooling under Illya's head and gluing his clothing to the linoleum floor. It stuck to his hair, turning the blond a gut-wrenching crimson, and it made it difficult, for a moment, for Napoleon to see the wound._

_The wound itself made his guts turn to water, even as he scrabbled for his communicator and barked frantic orders. Calls for a medic, calls for a helicopter to take them to the nearest hospital, instructions for blood transfusions, everything he could think of, before he cut it off sharply and bent to handle things as best he could._

_First and foremost – miraculously – the Russian was still breathing. His pulse was flickering under Napoleon's fingers, and his breath was shallow, but he hadn't been killed yet._

_But the wound itself was horrific. The bullet had not just clipped his skull, but had torn part of it away. The fragile meshing of bone above Illya's left ear had been destroyed, blasted apart by the impact, and between the blood leaking out of the hole like water from a tap, and the matted clumps of blond hair, Napoleon was faintly, disgustedly sure that he could see Illya's brain._

_"Oh God," he remembered saying, but nothing after that, although the Spanish agents who had responded to the calls had later told him that he had been babbling._

_He remembered needing to stop the bleeding, or Illya would bleed to death on the cold floor – or in the helicopter – before getting anywhere near a hospital. He remembered having to help move his partner's completely limp form onto a stretcher, hand and gauze clamped over that gaping hole. He remembered the lack of any kind of tension in Illya's limbs and the half-open eyes that had made him look so dead in the helicopter on the too-long ride to the hospital._

_But he couldn't remember what he had been saying._

_And when he had finally gotten the news that Illya had survived the surgery to mend his skull, had not died as a result of that scientist and that terribly botched mission...Napoleon had also had to bear the news that the Russian was no longer really alive, either._

_And for three long years, he had carried that with him._

* * *

"Now can you possibly understand," Napoleon whispered, after his halting explanation was through, "why I am so unbelievably delighted that you've come back to us? To me?"

"It was hardly a decision," Illya replied.

How could it have been? He remembered being on the flight to Santander, and then walking along the track road in Russia. And that glimpse of his childhood in Russia could not have lasted three entire years, could it?

And even if it had, why had his dreams shown him the same road, and Stepan? And why had he dreamed in Russian – in consistent, fluid Russian? He had not dreamed entirely in Russian since he had finished his degree in Cambridge. The English had always invaded and, eventually, had taken over completely.

How could any of this possibly be right?

"You'll settle," Napoleon soothed, misreading the lines in Illya's face. "We'll get you home, and you'll get back into your old life. And eventually it will be like nothing has happened."

Illya had barely agreed, so it seemed, before he was dressed in slacks and a casual shirt, and bundled back into a wheelchair, and then was sat in the back of a cab, and then was suddenly at Napoleon's apartment. He must have slept in the cab, he surmised, because there was no way that the journey had been that short, and Napoleon looked faintly amused when helping him back into the wheelchair.

"My things..."

"Are all here," Napoleon reminded him. "I told you. I've kept it all."

And he had – the apartment was cluttered with _their _things, mixed in together as if Illya had been living here for those three years. Even his jazz records, slotted in beside Napoleon's more conservative tastes in music, and a framed photograph of the pair of them sat on the end table that was home to the telephone and some random odds and ends.

It looked like Illya lived here...so why did he feel so unsettled by it all?

* * *

_Stepan was there again, waiting on the road when he dreamed, and although Illya accepted it as a dream, he could not escape the joy that swelled at seeing his old friend again, even though Stepan was serious, and all business, and cut to the chase, as Napoleon liked to say._

_"Do you agree, yet? There's something off about it all. Something not right."_

_"What do you mean?" Illya asked, though he thought that he already knew._

_"A bullet to the head and you're not severely brain damaged?" Stepan laughed. "I know you're a genius, Illya, you always were, but that...that's too much to hope for."_

_"They might have..."_

_"You and I have never dealt in might haves, so let us not start now when I'm not here to defend myself against them," Stepan joked, and Illya felt that pang of loss once again. Once, a long time ago, this man had meant to him as much as Napoleon did now, and his loss had been a terrible pain to carry. "Illya," Stepan said earnestly, shaking him a little by the shoulders. "You trusted me once, now trust me again. There is something wrong here."_

_"What?" Illya demanded. "If you know what it is, then tell me!"_

_"I'm not sure yet myself," Stepan said. "But there is. You have to keep your guard up. There's something wrong about all of this."_


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Seven**

It felt, to Napoleon, as if they were back near the beginning of their partnership all over again. Illya was asleep, stretched out on Napoleon's couch and dead to the world once more, on a combination of painkillers and sheer exhaustion. He hadn't moved a muscle by himself in three years, and the stress of relocating from the medical wing to here had knocked him out cold.

But there was still a noticeable difference. Watching from his armchair, Napoleon knew that Illya only slept, nothing deeper. His eyelids flickered occasionally as he dreamed, and the hand curled on his chest clenched and relaxed every now and again – as much as it could anyway, being so helplessly weak now.

Illya had had difficulty even holding his head up by the time they reached Napoleon's apartment, and it had been like years ago. As if there had simply been an exhausting few missions, and when Illya was ready to drop, he would drop. Napoleon had lost count of the number of times he'd had to bundle his partner into bed so that his sleep wouldn't punish him with stiff muscles in the morning.

In the beginning of their partnership, the couch had become Illya's for a while. When Mr. Waverly had announced that their partnership would be a permanent feature, that had brought Illya under the Section Two code for living arrangements. For backup purposes, partners were to live not more than five minutes from one another by foot.

Illya had lived a good half hour in the opposite direction from Headquarters, and he had moved into an apartment block across the road. In the week gap between ending one lease and beginning another, he had slept on Napoleon's couch.

It had cemented their working relationship. Without that week, Napoleon wasn't sure he would ever have relaxed enough around Illya to get to know him. The Russian was frosty, undoubtedly, and intolerant of fools, and his very dry – judging by how he and Mark got along, very _British _– sense of humour had initially been lost on Napoleon.

But it had been moments like this, watching him sleep with his guard as far down as it ever got, that had told Napoleon that the man wasn't always quite like that. Maybe wasn't like that at all, on the inside.

They had had a good working relationship – a brilliant one, even. Napoleon found it difficult to trust people, but Illya had been one of the precious few. And in return, Napoleon knew that, even if the Russian would rather go another round with the enemy, he trusted the American in return.

Napoleon only hoped that that trust was still there – that Illya was not unsettled enough to push him away now, when the enemy was intangible and difficult to pin down. When the enemy was, in all likelihood, inside Illya's own mind.

* * *

Illya woke to the smell of something cooking, and chilly despite the heavy blankets on and around him. He pushed at them and felt a rush of anger at how weak he was, before there were other hands drawing them back and helping him to sit.

"Don't be like that," Napoleon urged. "It'll take time, you know that. Just be patient."

"When have you ever known me to be patient?"

"What?"

Illya belatedly realised that he hadn't used English, and repeated it.

"True," Napoleon said, but there was concern there. "Do you mind sticking to English instead of whatever that was?"

That was, perhaps, more disconcerting. Illya often talked to himself in Russian in the Section Eight labs when conducting experiments; Napoleon was well used to what Russian sounded like, and continuous sounds, even if he couldn't actually understand the language. If he hadn't recognise the language Illya used, it suggested an Eastern European one instead of Russian, English or the romance languages.

"Sorry," Illya said, and Napoleon sighed.

"Don't be," he murmured. "I know it'll take a while to find your equilibrium. At least you still speak English, right?"

Illya mentally ran through the database in his head of the various languages he spoke, as Napoleon propped him up on pillows against the arm of the couch and disappeared back into the kitchen. They seemed to be intact, but was he losing grasp of which one he was using when? Had they blurred in his head into one? Would he always do that?

"Stop worrying," Napoleon ordered when he came back. "I know that look. Good God, Illya, you've only been awake and aware for two weeks. Stop pushing."

"If I don't push, then I won't..."

"Save it for physical therapy," Napoleon said, putting the steaming bowl he carried down on the coffee table. "That'll start in a month, so I'm told. Until then, calm down and relax."

But Illya couldn't. He had always been a man with an edge in the physical world. Even in his childhood, he had been faster, stronger, better than the other children in the villages that he had lived in. In Kiev, he had survived because of his physical fitness; the same could be said a thousand times for a thousand missions for various military and espionage organisations in his lifetime.

And now he was so weak that his partner had to spoon feed him, that his hands shook when he tried to hold his own glass to drink, that he was exhausted by the simple act of eating and was half-asleep already by the time Napoleon removed the soup bowl and helped him lie down again.

"Get some rest," his partner's voice murmured, close by, and there was a soft touch to his hair. "It's the best healer."

* * *

_"Welcome back."_

_Stepan was sat on the steps of an abandoned house, smoking. It was how Illya remembered him – tousled and smiling and perpetually smoking. Stepan had always been a relaxed man, despite anything that happened in either of their lives._

_"I'd offer you one, but it would be a bit pointless," Stepan shrugged._

_"This is only a dream."_

_"Sort of," Stepan agreed. "It's not the real world, that's for sure. Haven't you got any questions about that?"_

_"You can't prove the world isn't real," Illya huffed._

_"No," Stepan agreed, "but I can prove it's not the one that you remember."_

_"How?"_

_Despite himself, Illya's curiosity and sense of dread had been piqued. Stepan was not a man prone to any kind of exaggeration: if he said he could prove it, then he was convinced that he could. And it was worrying to Illya – if Stepan was so utterly convinced that neither of these places was real, then how was Illya supposed to deal with that?_

_"Just look around, when you go back," Stepan shrugged. "There are logical problems."_

_"How would you know that?" Illya asked, suddenly sceptical. Stepan had been long dead by the time Illya had left the USSR. He would never have even come close to knowing about the Command, or Napoleon, or even America itself._

_"Hey," Stepan shrugged, "I'm only a figment of your imagination as well, you know."_

_And he grinned, and maybe it wasn't all bad._


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Eight**

A week passed, in which Illya dreamed of Stepan, and in Russian, every single night, and spent his days taking Stepan's advice and looking for...well, inaccuracies, he supposed.

The problem was that Illya didn't really know what he was looking for. On the surface, everything seemed normal. Napoleon had taken a leave of absence, he knew, to look after him. The apartment and its surroundings were as they should be – when Illya insisted on being taken somewhere else, the parts of New York he saw were as they should be as well, even when he made allowances for three years in absentia.

But as the week dragged on, Illya began to spot glimpses of, perhaps, Stepan meant.

The first signs came from Napoleon himself. He was...almost too attentive. Either Illya had been lied to about what had happened – and he couldn't imagine Napoleon lying to him about something so important – or Napoleon carried some serious guilt about the incident. He...fussed, maybe, was the right term.

Illya had been injured on plenty of missions, sometimes very seriously. And Napoleon had never _fussed_. He had looked after him, cared for him, but he hadn't fussed. When Illya had one of his tempers and told him – harshly – to go away, he would, and would come back only when enough time had elapsed that Illya had calmed down. With lesser injuries, he wouldn't come back at all, and Illya would see him again in work when they were healed.

But now...Napoleon was constantly _there_. He couldn't even sit in the same room without watching over Illya, talking to him, checking everything was fine. It was oppressive and it wasn't like Napoleon.

Maybe Stepan had a point.

By the end of the second week, Illya was...unnerved. To put it bluntly. Although his strength was beginning to return – albeit only to the point where he could function – he was still housebound, and sleeping most of the days and nights away.

And yet, Napoleon was still always there.

But it was when, one week and four days after Stepan's declaration, Illya woke to see the man himself leaning in the bedroom door and smiling like a particularly mischievous ghost, he knew he was in serious trouble.

* * *

_"It's not enough," he demanded of Stepan that night, "that you're in my dreams, but now you're in..."_

_"Your other dreams?" Stepan shrugged. "Surely that's proof for you. It's not the right place out there."_

_"So where is it?" Illya demanded._

_Stepan said nothing._

* * *

Therein was the problem. If Stepan was right, and Illya was not currently in the real world, then where was he?

Had he never woken from the coma? Or had the mission that Napoleon had told him never happened at all? Was he merely asleep (though why a mere dream would cause all this hassle, Illya didn't know) or had there been another accident?

He had to admit, with the number of times that he'd been struck over the head in the past, it wasn't exactly crazy to think that he could have sustained a serious head injury from somewhere else. And it certainly explained the headaches that had dogged him since leaving the Medical section.

Had he even come to America in the first place? He had been knocked around a fair few times before, in London, in Paris, in Georgia, and in Moscow. Nevermind going as far back as his childhood. Children growing up in towns battered by war seldom come out unscathed.

If Stepan was right, then Illya could have dreamed literally everything about his life.

Did _Napoleon _even exist?

"Illya? Everything alright?"

He became faintly aware that he was frowning, and smoothed it away again at Napoleon's anxious face.

"Fine," he said.

He didn't realise until later that he had spoken in Russian again.

* * *

Napoleon was frightened.

The lapses were getting worse. Illya was speaking more and more in his mother tongue, and going off into brooding silences. He was sleeping more, as well, and deeper than he had been in the first few days out of the hospital. While he _wanted _to put it down to the man not being afraid to sleep any more, he couldn't.

He knew that there was something wrong.

Some part of him didn't want to tell the doctors. They would take Illya back, back into the Medical section, and then it would be like they were back to square one. But _not _to tell them would be like...if anything happened to Illya because Napoleon hadn't told them about these lapses, then he may as well have pulled the trigger himself.

And that idea was simply unbearable.

He had to tell the doctors. He had to take Illya back in. And while under ordinary circumstances, Napoleon would rather go for best out of three with that Colonel Nexor persona than try and get Illya within twenty feet of a doctor, he knew, too, that Illya would not be able to put up much of a fight now.

So when he went into the spare room on Friday morning to wake Illya, with the intention of taking him to the doctor, he had not expected the bed to be empty, and Illya's meagre possessions to be gone.

* * *

Stepan materialised in the passenger seat of Napoleon's car, which Illya had 'liberated' for the time being.

"That was quick," he observed, and Illya was disturbed to note that he couldn't tell if Stepan was using English or Russian. And he only knew it wasn't French because Stepan had never spoken French.

"You know me," Illya muttered.

"Yes," Stepan agreed. "Once you made a decision, you always went with it. Stick to your guns."

He eyed the handgun that Illya had likewise 'liberated' from Napoleon's gun safe, and wryly added:

"Literally."

Illya said nothing.

"What _is _your plan?" Stepan asked.

Truth be told, Illya wasn't entirely sure. All he knew was that if he voiced his concerns to Napoleon, or the doctors, or (God forbid) the shrink, then he would be at the funny farm faster than Napoleon's head turned after a pretty girl.

So the first step was to get away from the U.N.C.L.E. and go into hiding. And if nothing else, Illya had been a very good spy. He still had his aliases, still knew how to escape, and if his hands were shaking on the steering wheel, so what?

He would get away, regroup, and figure out what to do.

After all, how did one prove that one was alive?


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Nine**

Stepan was right.

That was the first thought on Illya's mind once he had gotten himself on the aeroplane. That Stepan, damn him, was right.

Illya had, apparently, spent years in a coma. Years of motionless existence. He had used every ounce of resolve that he possessed to get himself onto this plane, drawn on reserves rarely touched to do this under his own power.

And, draining and difficult and _painful _as it had been, he _knew _that it should never have been enough. He should have collapsed in the airport – hell, he should have collapsed in the car, skidded off the road, been killed.

But here he was, panting and exhausted and sweating and shaking, and in none of the good ways, in the narrow airline seats that passed for reasonable these days.

Stepan was right.

The ghost – hallucination, ghost, memory: what difference did it make? – had vanished for the moment, leaving Illya alone with his thoughts. Perhaps it was simply too busy for Stepan, or perhaps for the moment, Illya's mind didn't need him to bounce noise off.

And so, naturally, Illya's thoughts turned to Stepan.

Stepan had been Illya's friend at the University of Georgia. The only two on their course to be from Moscow, they had bonded quickly and firmly, and had remained friends for several years. They had talked about nearly everything – until Napoleon, Stepan was the closest Illya had come to trusting someone.

But the facts were as they were: Illya had little thought of Stepan since leaving the USSR. What would have been the point? Illya was in espionage, and Stepan...Stepan was not. Stepan was also, rumour had it, a degenerate. Visits would put both of them at risk.

And then Stepan had died, and any potential thoughts had vanished too. He was no longer a part of Illya's life, so why had he been resurrected in this...whatever it was? Was it simply that Illya had trusted him, or was it that Illya's entire tenure away from Russia had been imagined, and he was, in reality, still in Stepan's life?

The thought gave him a headache. Well, made the current one worse. The mere _idea _that well over a decade of his life was false...well. It was enough to drive you mad.

* * *

_"Can't you leave me alone?"_

_Illya was well aware that he sounded waspish, but Stepan only smirked._

_"You visit me in my dreams and in...when I'm awake. Can't you give me a moment's peace?"_

_"Not if I have to keep reminding you," Stepan said. "You seem to have grasped the issue at hand, but running away isn't going to help. Not really."_

_"That's where you're wrong."_

_"How so?"_

_"If this isn't real," Illya said, "if nothing out there is real, if I'm...dreaming, or dead, or hallucinating, or...or whatever I'm doing...then what's making it seem real?"_

_This was familiar. Stepan had always been a sounding board for Illya's ideas, despite the fact that their respective IQ scores would have been a good forty or fifty points apart, had any of the Russian authorities bothered to test Stepan's mental strength. Which they wouldn't have – purely and simply because he didn't have any._

_And, true to form, Stepan merely shrugged._

_"What I already know," Illya said. "My mind's...drawing on what I know already..."_

_"Or what you think you know."_

_"But if I only thought I knew it, then I wouldn't know it. It would be false – a creation, an illusion, imaginary. And I have never practised my imagination, of all things."_

_This was true. Illya had not been prone to bouts of imagination as a child. He was Russian, born and bred: pragmatic and factual, and endlessly realistic, if a little cynical. He could be perfectly sociable if he wanted to be, and could logically plan the most convoluted plans, but imagination was a different story. He was not – and had never been – a spectacularly imaginative man._

_It was, therefore, unlikely that his brain could flawlessly construct an enormous world for him to play in, when it was likely damaged in the first place._

_"If you're brain damaged," Stepan said, "then you could be imaginative now. It might have changed you."_

_"And if I'm making this up," Illya said, "it explains how you know I was thinking of brain damage."_

_Stepan laughed._

_"So I really am a figment of your imagination?" he said. "Or whatever you have that passes for it?"_

_"What other option is there?" Illya said. "You're dead."_

_"So what's your plan, to jolt yourself out of your little fantasy world?" Stepan asked._

_"Prove it isn't real. The subsequent shock should – I hope – force my mind to take stock of the facts again."_

_"Hm," Stepan said, and shrugged. "Just remember what they told us when we were kids, Illya."_

_"What?"_

_"Well, I don't know about yours, but my mother always warned me that if people dreamed that they died," Stepan smirked, "then they died in their beds that same night."_

* * *

By the time the plane landed, Illya's head was bordering on the crippling. He swayed off the craft like a drunk and had to sit down barely inside the terminal building for several minutes before making his way to the security checks.

Disturbingly, his fatigue was even less acute than it had been before. Clearly, his mind was abandoning the idea that his physical body should have suffered. Was his hallucinating psyche _forgetting _about the coma? Had there _ever _been a coma?

Illya wondered whether, in reality, he was in one now. Was _this _his coma?

Either way, he hoped he was soon to find out.

He had been, to use Napoleon's terms, sneaky. He knew that the assumption would be that he'd fled the country, or even – in a deluded state – returned to his homeland. Instead, he had caught a flight, under an assumed name (that he couldn't recall using before, but at this stage, that meant nothing) to Miami.

He had been to Miami once, and could barely remember it. If his mind could conjour up a living metropolis for him that he could barely remember (and the most vivid of those memories were the airport itself) then he would be impressed.

Unnerved, but impressed.

"So get moving."

He snorted, didn't look at Stepan, but obeyed.

* * *

_"So how was Miami?"_

_It was an odd sensation. Every other time, Illya had not been aware of the transition between 'awake' and 'asleep' but he appeared on the road as if bursting into existence, as if popping between one world and the next, and Stepan was waiting with that idle smirk and easy humour._

_For the first time, though, Illya took stock of himself. He was not, as would seem logical to him, dressed like he had done when living in Russia. He didn't look a bit different to the way he did in New York – haircut, suit, shoes: it was all the same._

_"Illya?"_

_  
All of it._

_"It was...a city," Illya said. "Constructed out of many American cities I have seen before."_

_"Oh?"_

_"I'm fairly certain there is no Del Floria's in Miami," Illya said dryly._

_And that's what it had been. A conglomeration of cities that Illya had seen before – some not even American, but British or French – although his mind had, apparently, remembered not to push the distinct concrete architecture of the industrial cities of Russia into the sunny world of Florida._

_"So," Stepan said, "you've established that isn't the real world. What are you going to do?"_

_"Well, the easier option would be to stay here until you and I can figure this out," Illya said. "But, as we both know I cannot sleep forever..."_

_The headache was present now, even in the sleeping world, and Illya clutched to the pain like it was a valuable reminder._

_A link._

_"People who die in their dreams," Stepan warned._

_"I know," Illya felt for the familiar weight at his side, and drew out the pistol, eyeing the metal plains as if it were an alien object, as if he'd never held a gun in his life._

_"I refuse to take responsibility if we're wrong about this," Stepan said, but he made no move as Illya turned the gun curiously._

_"Why would you?" Illya asked, and raised it, aiming for the point of pain in his head. "You're already dead. What on earth could I do to you?"_

_He was aware of the motion of firing, but not of the sound of the shot._


	10. Chapter 10

**Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.**

* * *

**In The Blink of an Eye**

**Chapter Ten**

The world was...still.

It was an unusual situation. Illya was used to waking up to chaos – although well-acquainted with being smashed over the head, he was never out for long, and usually managed to recover in the middle of the same chaos that had felled him.

So to drift back up through the layers of consciousness – a luxury he had not permitted himself since a drunken student party at the Sorbonne – in such stillness and silence was...odd.

"Good afternoon."

The familiar voice – and how Illya relaxed at the sound of it – was filled with an easy humour that let Illya calm down, and he cracked open sensitive eyes to the white of a hospital room, and the tired smile on Napoleon's face.

"What...?" he managed, before subsiding, and Napoleon chuckled.

"Rather one too many strikes for the enemy, my friend," he said lightly. "A T.H.R.U.S.H. guard hit you with a vase and you went down like a sack of potatoes."

"Where...?"

"Oviedo," Napoleon said, and shrugged. "The Spanish could use better medical facilities, I suppose, but they extracted us promptly. You've been out about two hours."

Illya's sigh was heavy, releasing. Two hours. Not three years. Two hours.

"A...a scientist," he said eventually. "And...the team from Santander."

"Yes," Napoleon said. "We got him, by the way. But apparently your skull decided it had had quite enough of being abused and turned you off."

"When can we leave?" Illya demanded. He shifted to sit up, and the headache exploded anew behind his eyes. He heard himself groan, as his senses spun, and Napoleon snorted.

"When you can walk in something approaching a straight line," he said. "They won't let you fly with a head injury, Illya, you know that as well I do."

"Right now, I would settle for being out of the hospital," Illya said sourly.

Napoleon chuckled again, and Illya closed his eyes. The sound was warm and reassuring, even in the distastefully familiar surroundings of a hospital.

"Illya?"

"What?"

"Care to tell me why you seemed so surprised to be here?"

He didn't bother to ask how Napoleon had noticed. The man was strange – so unprofessional, so suave and cavalier, so carefree and sometimes downright silly. And yet it would be unusual for him to miss those tiny signs that something was out of place. He was not surprised that the man had noticed, even as he checked himself mentally for anything that would have given things away.

"Later," he said, and Napoleon subsided easily enough.

The sound of the ceiling fan was the world for a while, and then Illya drifted away again.

* * *

Four days later found them at a hotel in Santander approved by the local U.N.C.L.E. wing, and under orders not to put 'Señor Rusiano' anywher near an aeroplane, or any other kind of transportation device faster than the average Basque taxi.

As Russians were still – understandably – undesirable in Spain (perhaps even more so than in the USA) what with the slightly differing political viewpoints of Franco's regime and the USSR, Illya had allowed himself to remain in the hotel, being, for lack of a better term, idle in the rare period of rest and recuperation that he was allowed.

In those days, he had slowly told Napoleon of the situation he'd thought he was in – be it a dream, or a hallucination, or something else entirely.

"I would aim for hallucination," Napoleon advised. "You weren't exactly still and calm."

"No?"

"No," Napoleon said. "We had to strap you down in the helicopter to the hospital. You were absolutely out of it. An interrogation drug couldn't have thrown you for a better loop."

"I was...speaking?"

"Babbling," Napoleon shrugged. "Usual kind of head-injury nonsense. Mostly in Hungarian, though, and you were probably cursing a blue streak. Vasquez only goes that colour when someone is being very insulting about his God."

Illya couldn't help himself, and snickered.

"Who's Stepan?" Napoleon asked.

Illya started, and frowned.

"I talked about...?"

"No, you talked _to _him," Napoleon said. "Who was he?"

"A...friend. From Moscow. He...I trusted him," Illya said. "As much as I do you, perhaps even more. But I haven't thought about him in years. He's been dead for over a decade. Why would he have been in my...hallucinations?"

Napoleon shrugged.

"He was the one who told me that it wasn't real," Illya murmured.

"Maybe that's why," Napoleon said. "You trusted him. His judgement mattered to you. You might not have listened to anyone else."

"But it seems too...simple. Too easy to say that it was just a...a concussion-induced dream," Illya argued.

"The mind is a strange thing," Napoleon said. "You can believe in your friend's ghost coming back to guide you, you can believe in your brain's systems simply misfiring badly. Whatever you want. You'll probably never know."

"How do I know _this _is real?"

There was a long pause, in which Napoleon surveyed him almost warily. This was the man he had missed in his dreams. The man who cared, undoubtedly, but did not fuss. Who left him his distances and was there when he was required. Who would never fail to come through for him, but could just as easily annoy him, argue with him, and fight him, in any scenario they chose.

"Well, if your Stepan turns up again, telling you it's not, you'd better trust him, hadn't you?" Napoleon said finally. "But for the time being, seeing as there's not a chance they'll be selling Russian vodka to a man with Kuryakin for a last name around here, do you want some brandy or are you going to stick with that revolting sangria?"

* * *

_There was no headache._

_The lakeshore was calm and peaceful, if one did not look at the water. Where normally there would have been a clear blue sky reflected in the still, smooth surface, now it was broken with bodies, the blood lapping at the shore like a foamy sea._

_But the rattle of gunfire had died away at last, and though the birds were still silent for the time being, it was a horrifically peaceful scene._

_Illya stood barefoot, just beyond the reach of the bloody water. It was a dream: the temperatures that day had been abominable, even for the Ukraine, and he would not have dreamed of taking his boots and socks off then. And, being a dream, the horrors of it were distant to him, and he was able to observe the decline of the battlefield like some watcher outside of time and space._

_It came to him slowly that he was alone._

_Oh, there were bodies, and there were the dead and dying, and from far away he could hear women and children screaming – those that were alive._

_But there was no deep timbre, no familiar resonance, no smirk from a familiar, long-gone face._

_Stepan slept on in his cold Russian grave, and Illya was alone._

_It was real again – or, at the very least, real enough._

**End**


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